(RE-)EXAMINING HORIZONS IN FEMINIST TRANSLATION

STUDIES: TOWARDS A THIRD WAVE?1

Olga Castro
Universidade de Vigo
Mark Andrews (Translation)

Abstract

Feminisms are one of those framework theories that have contributed powerfully to all areas of
society, including Translation Studies. The most evident outcome of this interplay is the
emergence, in the 1980s, of a Feminist Translation school in Canada, which placed gender in
the spotlight. Despite criticism and subsequent redefinitions of the notion of feminist
translation, the Canadian school is still generally regarded as the paradigm of interaction
between feminisms and translation. The aim of this article is two-fold: firstly, to advance new
approaches to the practice of translation and paratranslation from a feminist perspective (within
the context of a third wave of feminist translation). Secondly, to open new debates by means of
(re)examining topics of mutual interest for both Translation Studies and Feminisms on a
conceptual, historical and critical plane, so that subsequent studies can be fostered.

Resumen

Los feminismos son una de esas teorías marco cuyas contribuciones son perceptibles en todos
los ámbitos de la sociedad, incluidos los estudios de traducción. La materialización más
evidente de esta interacción es el surgimiento, en los 80, de una corriente de traducción
feminista en Canadá, capaz de colocar el género en el centro del debate sobre traducción. En la
actualidad, y pese a las críticas y posteriores redefiniciones del concepto de traducción
feminista, la propuesta canadiense sigue concibiéndose por lo general como paradigma de
interacción entre feminismos y traducción. En este artículo propongo nuevas aproximaciones a
la práctica de traducir y paratraducir desde los feminismos, dentro de una tercera ola de
traducción feminista. Además, pretendo abrir el debate (re)examinando áreas de interés mutuo
para los estudios de traducción y los feminismos en el plano conceptual, historiográfico y
crítico, con el propósito de que sugieran nuevas líneas de investigación futura.

Keywords: Feminist translation. Feminist paratranslation. Ideology. 3rd wave feminism.

Gender and translation.

Palabras clave: Traducción feminista. Paratraducción feminista. Ideología. Tercera ola

feminista. Género y traducción.

1
This article is an English version of "(Re)examinando horizontes en los estudios feministas de traducción: ¿hacia
una tercera ola?" by Olga Castro, which was first published in MonTI 1 (2009), pp. 59-86. It was not included on
the print version of MonTI for reasons of space. The online version of MonTI does not suffer from these
limitations, and this is our way of promoting plurilingualism and internationalism.
2trans Olga Castro

Within the context of the numerous ‘post-’ theories from the 70s (post-colonialism, post-
modernism, post-structuralism) and a renewed interest in cultural studies, an encounter between
feminisms and translation studies (TS) has taken place that will surely benefit both disciplines.
One of the visible results of this intersection can be seen in the birth of the Canadian school of
feminist translation. Its contribution to TS was (and still is) such that, despite the criticism and
later redefinitions of the notion of feminist translation, mainstream Translation Studies today
still commonly see the Canadian proposal as the universal paradigm of feminist translation and,
by extension, as the paradigm of the interaction between feminisms and translation.
Yet, in a time like now, in which feminisms find themselves immersed in a process of
internal debate after realising that second wave feminism (the one that had inspired the
Canadian school) is not valid as a framework in which to develop new proposals, I suggest that
the circumstances are right for expanding the areas of study that could arise from the interaction
between the two disciplines.2 First of all, I propose we gather together and re-examine from a
critical perspective some of the areas of mutual interest shared by feminisms and translation.
Despite some of them having been already studied, they still lack a systematic structure because
they have been largely overshadowed by the Canadian proposal. At this point my aim is to go
beyond the fundamentally practical level and to address the conceptual, historiographical,
critical or professional levels, which will afford a more holistic understanding of the points of
intersection between feminisms and translation and thus help to promote these renewed research
horizons. Secondly, I propose re-examining the practical level with the aid of the new feminist
approaches to translation and paratranslation, as acts of intercultural ideological mediation
(Garrido 2005), within the framework offered by third wave feminist linguistics (Mills 2003 and
2008).

1. The encounter between feminisms and translation

One of the many contributions feminisms have made to knowledge is the critical review to
which they have submitted different scientific and humanistic disciplines, with the aim of
casting doubt on their supposedly neutral and objective nature and revealing the fact that they
actually follow patriarchal criteria (albeit to varying degrees). Nevertheless, right from the
outset the feminist review of translation had an added particularity because this discipline was
already fully engaged in a process of internal debate aimed at enabling it to adapt to the novel
philosophical conceptions of the times. In that moment, then, TS were witnessing the birth of
new approaches that did not focus the study of translation on the product itself, but rather on the
process of translation, on which the product is clearly dependent:

The purpose of translation theory is to reach an understanding of the processes undertaken

in the act of translation and not, as so commonly misunderstood, to provide a set of norms
for effecting the ‘perfect’ translation. (Bassnett 1991: 37)

Descriptive studies began to question those theories that focused mainly on listing
techniques with which to carry out a linguistic shift by going from the surface structures of one
text to those of another with the least possible interference in order to remain faithful to the
author’s intention and the original text. Instead, the new approaches considered “the orientation
towards cultural rather than linguistic transfer” (Snell-Hornby 1990: 82), thus leading to a
“cultural turn” in translation. This turn involved the incorporation of the cultural dimension
“making language work as a parallel system to culture instead of as an external referential
entity” (Nouss 2000: 1351).

2
I use the term discipline for practical reasons, although with certain reservations, since the numerous interrelations
that both feminisms and translation studies have with other areas of knowledge mean that it would be more
accurate to call them interdisciplines or transdisciplines.

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These new approaches also began to query the hitherto neutral, objective and invisible role
of the translator. Instead, they claimed that translators actually played a far more active role,
since the first step in translating (or re-writing, as it is called by Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 10)
consists in reading an original text written by an author who must be aware of the existence of
various (although not an infinite number of) possible ways of reading and interpreting the text.
The idea of producing a text that is equivalent and faithful to the original or to the author’s
intention is therefore impossible. For these new approaches it is not words that are translated but
meanings; and these are not to be found in the original text or in the author’s intention. Instead
they are the result of negotiations within the social system in which the text is produced and
consumed. Hence, the only thing that we can be faithful to is the interpretation (of the original
or of the author’s intended meaning) that each translator comes to through reading the text.
Ideology is considered to be a significant concept when it comes to translating. Indeed, far
from understanding it as a deviation away from objectivity, ideology is now defined as a
systematic set of values and beliefs shared by a particular community and which shape the way
each person, and also each translator, interprets and represents the world. In fact, conceiving
ideology as something apart from the translator would leave this mediating agent, as well as the
actual process itself, outside the concept of cultural exchange. Objectivity and neutrality in
translation are biased fallacies and, thus, the cultural turn could equally be called the ideological
turn. Thus, schools of thought like the Manipulation School or Polysystem Theory now defend
the idea that “ideology rather than linguistics or aesthetics crucially determines the operational
choices of translators” (Cronin 2000: 695).
In short, when feminisms began to approach translation, the latter had already overcome (at
least in its theoretical discourse) the debate about faithfulness, equivalence and objectivity and
was asking itself questions that made it necessary to think about cultural and ideological issues.
Analysing reality from the perspective of culture and ideology had been on feminisms’ agenda
for some time, and as a result they saw their relationship with translation as being mutually
enriching. On the one hand, the debate that was taking place in TS provided feminisms with a
series of new viewpoints. And on the other hand, TS recognised how connecting with this
discipline helped to consolidate its proposals, but it was also capable of enriching itself by
applying a gender approach to statements such as “all translation implies a degree of
manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose” (Hermans 1985: 11). Feminisms, then,
saw that failing to consciously subscribe to one particular ideology in translation implies
unconsciously adhering to the dominant (patriarchal) ideology, that is to say, the one all
societies have and that dominates both in the numerical sense and because it supports the
interests of the dominant class, which therefore forces it to disguise itself and operate at the
unconscious level (Althusser 1975). This is why it is presented before the translator as being
‘normal’, ‘natural’ and unquestionable common sense, and thus achieves its aim of symbolic
domination (Bourdieu 1998) which turns ‘unwary’ translators into naive vehicles for conveying
and legitimising the dominant discourse. The situation is made even worse by the fact that
ideology is more effective when it is not openly manifested as such.

1.1. Canadian feminist translation

Parallel to the development of this new theoretical-methodological framework, within the

Anglo-French cultural dialogue in Canada a new school of thought also came into being that
identified translation as the combination of a practising theory and a theorising practice from
which to examine cultural and ideological issues. Canadian feminist translation (cf. Godard
1990; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; von Flotow 1991 and 1997; Simon 1996; Vidal 1998: 101-120)
is a school of work and thought that defends the incorporation of the feminist ideology into
translation because of the need to establish new ways of expression that make it possible to free
language and society from their patriarchal burden. The Canadian feminist translators, Barbara
Godard, Marlene Wildeman, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood or Luise von Flotow and their
male colleague, Howard Scott, produced English translations of avant-garde literary texts
written by French-speaking women authors from Quebec. These texts were characterised by
their consci(enti)ous attacks on the misogynistic conventions of patriarchal language and by

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4trans Olga Castro

building up a parallel feminist literary culture, all of which was strongly influenced by the post-
modern theories of language. From these texts the Canadian translators conceive translation as a
continuation of the process of creating and disseminating meanings within a contingent network
of discourses. Given the characteristics inherent in French (which, with its grammatical gender,
continually makes the sex of the referents explicit) and in English (with its many neutrals and
epicenes), the feminist translators innovated to find new formulas of expression that did not
erase the gender marks of the original. Thus, for example, French auteures became authers
instead of the generic form authors. The strategies they used were later systematised as
supplementing, prefacing, footnoting and hijacking the text3 (von Flotow 1991: 74-84) and were
used to defend the visibility of women translators: “womanhandling the text in translation
means replacing the modest, self-effacing translator” (Godard 1990: 93). They understood
translation as a “rewriting in the feminine” converted into “political activity aimed at making
language speak for women” (Lotbinière-Harwood 1991: 125).
Outside Canada these strategies were used by Suzanne Jill Levine (1983) to produce
English renderings of “oppressively male, narcissistic, misogynistic and manipulative” post-
modern texts by the Latin-American author Cabrera Infante. She deliberately chooses to become
a “subversive scribe” who rewrites the text in a faithfully unfaithful subversive manner.

1.2. Criticism and redefinitions

This school made notable contributions to TS because it insisted on the need to reflect, both
consciously and critically, on the elements that are present in the text to be translated before
rewriting it. Since the relationship between ST and TT can be affected by a number of different
aspects, it also refuted the traditional paradigm based on absolute replication between the texts,
and advocated the visibility of the translator. Nevertheless, its strategies have received a certain
amount of criticism4 that accuses them of falling into the “infamous double standard” of the
traditional theories of translation (Arrojo 1994: 149) and of applying hypocritical and
contradictory ethics (Arrojo 1995). In short, for this author:

they are perfectly legitimate within the political context they are so bravely fighting to
construct [...] However, they are not absolutely more ‘noble’ or more justifiable than the
patriarchal translations and notions they are trying to deconstruct. (1994: 159)

In addition, proclamations stating that their objective consists in “making language speak
for women” under all circumstances end up by associating feminist translation with an
essentialist attitude based on a distinctive feminine culture that erases the differences between
women themselves and with a stable, universal definition of women as an oppressed group.
Other conceptions of feminist translation then arose to overcome the previous essentialist
bias. In this regard we have to understand the proposals that have taken the diversity of women
and experiences as the basis for exploring different ways of “translating in feminine”. Maier (in
Godayol 1998: 161) considers her position as that of a “woman-identified translator” or
“gender-conscious translator”, because her translations are not to be identified as women but
with women. Díaz-Diocaretz also reflects on her feminist translation of Adrienne Rich (1985).
Massardier-Kenney (1997), on the other hand, proposes a “redefinition of feminist translation
practice” that contemplates author-centred strategies and translator-centred strategies.
Despite this criticism and these redefinitions, it is still common today for the Canadian
feminist translation school to be conceived by mainstream TS as the paradigm of interaction
among feminisms and translation. From a (self-)critical perspective, however, this is
counterproductive because it restricts the productive development of other areas of research.

3
Massardier-Kenney (1997) shows how the Canadian strategies are not inventions, but re-adaptations of other
strategies that have been used unquestioningly for centuries.
4
Other patriarchal criticism simply ridiculed them without offering any convincing arguments.

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(Re-)Examining Horizons In Feminist Translation Studies 5trans

2. (Re-)examining horizons: old and new interactions

I cannot deny that the Canadian propositions made a significant contribution to TS by raising
new, necessary questions about the ideological act of translation that situated gender at the heart
of the debate. I also acknowledge the fact that they were very productive in their specific
contexts, but my view is that in order to enhance debate and interrelations between TS and other
disciplines, it is necessary to extend the areas of study that may arise from the interaction
between translation studies and feminisms. A good way to do so, in my opinion, is to start by
gathering some of the studies carried out in the past on other convergences between feminisms
and translation by subject areas, which would allow us to gain a more integral understanding of
the interaction. At the same time it would also be an invitation to take a fresh look at these areas
of study, which include the conceptual, historiographical and critical planes, as well as a revised
practical plane.

2.1. Conceptual plane

It is important to examine the theoretical discourse on translation from a feminist perspective,

not only for reasons related to social justice, but also due to the potential value the (submissive
or critical) reading of this theoretical discourse has in the training of professionals. Rejecting the
theory implies denying the need to be critical about reality, and thus the aim of the theoretical
framework is to help us reflect on how to improve the practice (Vidal 1998: 120), to understand
the dimension of translation and to comprehend the limits and liberties involved in its practice.

2.1.1. Metaphorisation of translation

Throughout history metaphors have often been used to explain the act of translation, since as
pointed out by D’hulst (1992) there is something about the experience of translating that
requires a metaphoric language. What Chamberlain reveals in her influential essay “Gender and
the Metaphorics of Translation” (1992) is that most of these theoretical discourses on translation
have been based on misogynistic conceptions about gender roles (thus legitimising them). One
of these frequent and well-known metaphors is that of “Les belles infidèles”, an expression
coined by Gilles Ménage in the early 17th century in France to describe the fact that translations,
just like women, will be unfaithful (infidèles) if they are beautiful (belles).
The concept of faithfulness and concern about the origin/originality of the source text is
present in many other metaphors about translation that are reflected in the daily language: the
paternity of a text, penetration of the source text, faithful translation, betrayal of language, and
so forth. In addition to the notion of property (women belong to men just as the text belongs to
its author), metaphors have also been created to uphold the idea that, in marriage as in
translation, legitimacy can only be guaranteed by a promise of faithfulness, and without such a
vow translators can sire textual bastards (Schleiermacher, in Godayol 2000: 44).
Other metaphors have recourse to violence to explain the translation process. In the
prologue to his translation of Horace, Drant justifies the ‘rape’ of the original text by comparing
it with the process of purification a husband (the translator) carries out to prepare a captive
woman (Horace’s text) and then penetrate her, kidnap her, take her as his own and make her his
wife:

First, I have now done as the people of God were commanded to do with their captive
women that were handsome and beautiful: I have shaved off his hair and pared off his nails,
that is, I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter. (in Chamberlain 1992: 61)

Sexist metaphors are not only to be found in the classical age. Steiner’s hermeneutical
model also presents a process of translation in four phases, “as a hermeneutic of trust, of
penetration, of embodiment and of restitution” (Steiner 1992: 319), with an erotic language and
a sexed model where metaphorically the man is the translator and the woman, the translation.

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6trans Olga Castro

Classical sexed rhetoric is also used by Derrida, when he puts forward a proposal for a
translation contract (like that of a marriage) by which the translation marries the original in
order to be comple(men)ted in another new text that guarantees the survival of both.
The metonymic code of twofold inferiority of women and translation lies at the base of
many other metaphors. This twofold inferiority arises from the opposition between
productive/active work (carried out by men and authors) and reproductive/passive work (carried
out by women and translators). According to Chamberlain, the job of reproduction, whether it is
of human beings (done by women) or of texts (done by translators), is generally undervalued
and even despised in the hierarchical structures that define our culture, despite their being
absolutely essential. Thus, women and translation are conceived as peripheral elements with
regard to a core element: translation is secondary to writing and the translator is in the same
position with respect to the author, in the same way that feminisms are peripheral with regard to
patriarchy and women with respect to men. As Florio (1603) stated, “because they are
necessarily defective, all translations are reputed females” (in Simon 1996: 1). For Chamberlain
(1992: 66), the reason why these metaphors are sexualised is quite clear: it makes it easier to
justify the power between the source text and the translation, that is, what is presented as being
an aesthetics problem is in actual fact a question of power.
From the foregoing we can gather that TS need to take a (self-)critical look that examines
other possible metaphors and theoretical discourses from a feminist perspective. Furthermore,
this will also have positive consequences for translation, since subverting the negative
(reproductive/passive) character of women on the basis of their traditionally devalued status also
raises doubts about the secondary and underrated conception of translating as a profession. But
in addition to this, from TS it is also possible to propose a new rhetoric of translation that
deconstructs the hierarchies between sexes and texts, and which replaces cliché language with a
terminology that is capable of transmitting the active game of identities that converge in
translation. This new rhetoric, far from erasing the mark of gender, could actually keep it as a
strategy to re-define it, thereby freeing it from its oppressing patriarchal burden.
A draft that could be used to guide the construction of a new rhetoric of translation could be
based on double-experience5 metaphors, since both translation and feminisms claim (each from
its own peripheral position) that their subject has the privilege of having access to both the
dominant and the alternative/desirable reality. Hence, feminists are familiar with both the
patriarchal structure in which they are living and the system of equality they advocate, in the
same way that translators are familiar with both the source language/culture and the target
language/culture.
Another of the many possible proposals could be to establish a rhetoric based on a non-
essentialist difference that sets out from the idea that both feminisms and translation are
important tools for the study and the critical understanding of difference as it is (re)presented in
language. In translation, we are referring to the difference between the rewritten and the original
text that legitimises creation and production, to the detriment of reproduction (going back to the
aforementioned idea of “translation as rewriting”). With regard to feminisms, on the other hand,
it is the difference between genders, but also between each individual person with respect to any
other (and even with respect to themselves at different times in their life), thus avoiding any
recourse to essentialist stances that hold that there is a feminine and/or masculine essence that
goes beyond any social and cultural limits. Instead, it should be held that the notion of
masculine and/or feminine identity is (at least in part) the result of a historical construct, the
consequence of a complex discursive process.

5
I use the notion of double experience to highlight the two endpoints of the range of possibilities, while attempting to
avoid a dichotomic binarism. Perhaps to do so, it would be more appropriate to speak of multiple experiences,
because the boundaries between them are so fuzzy that they give rise to an unlimited range of possibilities between
one extreme and the other.

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2.1.2. New conceptions of translation in parallel to the proposals of feminisms

Feminisms have been and are still enriched by their relationship with TS, but my intention here
runs in the opposite direction, i.e. to show how the theoretical discourses of translation can
benefit from observing, reflecting and applying certain core concepts of feminisms.
In this regard, Martín Ruano (2006: 28) claims that establishing parallelisms between the
evolution of the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘translation’, as the objects of study in the two
movements, is very beneficial for TS. Therefore, just as current feminisms de-essentialise and
question the biological concept of ‘woman’ as the stable starting point for any feminist theory
and policy, doubts can also be raised about whether translation arises from a material source text
that has a stable signification (thus de-essentialising the ideal and traditional definition of
translation). Just as the definition of ‘women’ has been attributed by ‘hetero-designation’ (since
women, as a group, have historically lacked the power to assert themselves) by and to the
benefit of the patriarchal system, doubts can also be raised about who has been defining
translation over the years, identifying it with a set of idealised, unreachable rules that had to be
obeyed (hence its prescriptive nature) in order to obtain the perfect replica. But even when
translation defines itself within the descriptive paradigm, translation is usually considered to be
whatever the target society/culture classifies as such, just as ‘woman’ is what a society/culture
conceives as such. Thus, just as feminisms claim that it is questionable that a woman does not
have the power to be what she wants to be (and has to behave as she is expected to in order to
achieve social acceptance), from a critical perspective TS could question the fact that translation
has to behave as it is expected to (in order to be considered as such), as this would preclude
experimental approaches that differ from mainstream approaches.
As a second example of new conceptions of translation stemming from core concepts of
feminisms, it could argued that just as feminisms emerge as a discourse of resistance against the
patriarchal and neo-liberal values that oppress and discriminate against gender, translation may
constitute, as proposed by Venuti, “a cultural means of resistance against multinational
capitalism and the political institutions to which the current global economy is allied” (2008:
18). Furthermore, given that multinational capitalism primarily follows misogynistic
conceptions, from the interaction of feminisms and translation we could conceive a more
heterogeneous means of cultural resistance that calls for political intervention to question the
two dominant discourses and foster critical reflection. Thus, the social activism implicit in both
disciplines is brought to light and dissipates the criticism that accused the theoretical discourses
(about translation and feminisms) of being nothing more than sterile philosophical digression.
These are but two examples of the many yet-to-be-explored contributions that feminisms
make to help start up debates in TS.

2.2. Historiographical plane

History grants legitimacy. If it is fundamental for any paradigm to have a past, for TS it
becomes of vital importance given the ‘youth’ of the discipline as such: only recently have the
theoretical reflections on translation ceased to be seen as a branch of other disciplines
(linguistics, literature, philology, etc.) and have managed to consolidate themselves as an
independent area of study, albeit with a deep transdisciplinary vocation.

2.2.1. Re-elaboration of the history of translation taking women/ translators into account

The construction of that past involves examining the historiography of translation. Throughout
long periods of history writing was considered to be a productive/masculine activity, and this
prevented many women from being able to enter the literary world as authors. Translation, seen
as a reproductive activity, is perceived as being feminine and thus becomes a safety valve that
enabled many women to gain access to the literary world. Nevertheless, in some cases, such as
18th century Great Britain, it was thought that only men could translate from the prestigious
classical languages, the work of women/ translators being restricted to ephemeral, secondary
literary texts in modern languages (cf. Agorni 2005).

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There were women authors, however, who could not repress their yearnings to write, and
produced their own works. The tight control over the power of authorship sometimes led them
to sign their works with a male nom de plume (cf. Bartrina 2001 to examine the case of Caterina
Albert, known as Victor Català), or to present themselves as translators (Kord 1994: 12), as a
strategy that allowed them to see their books published and avoid the social criticism that would
discredit their works even before anyone had begun to read them. In this way translation acts as
a liberating instrument that rescues women from a silence imposed on them as authors and
allows them to enter the literary world as translators; but it also acts as an instrument of
oppression because it relegates them to the outer edges of discourse.
In any event, these women translators/authors made themselves visible in prefaces,
dedications, footnotes, private correspondence, and so forth, where they reflected on the act of
translation and on the limitations that conditioned their practice. Nevertheless, these metatexts
have been lost and silenced, so that the conception that half of humanity had about the act of
translation remains excluded from the history of translation.
After feminisms have brought this shortcoming to light, a (self-)criticising attitude of TS
should lead to the recovery of these materials and metatexts, which will reveal to all how those
women participated in the cultural and intellectual movements of their time and the way they
confronted the patriarchal oppression. This will help reach a more accurate and thorough
definition of the discipline, which is otherwise lacking an essential part of its history. In this line
we find the works of Hannay (1985), Krontiris (1992), Robinson (1995), Delisle (2002) or
Agorni (2005), who complete the historiography of translation with the theoretical reflections of
Aphra Behn, Suzanne du Vegerre, Germaine de Staël, the English women translators of the
Tudor period, Susannah Dobson, Elizabeth Carter, Jane Wilde, Clémence Royer, Albertine
Necker de Saussure, Julia E. Smith, and so forth. In our most immediate context, notable
examples are the recovery of the Galician writer and translator Emilia Pardo Bazán (cf. Freire
2006) or the Catalan translators of the 20th century (cf. Godayol 2007).

2.2.2. Recovery of the ignored women authors

Despite the fact that women were nearly always excluded from authorship, as feminisms
gradually democratised public and private life, some of them were able to publish their works.
A gender approach reveals that the aesthetics and literary value have traditionally been defined
by a patriarchal canon, and thus the works of male authors were favoured to the detriment of
women authors, whether they were classical or contemporary, from nearby cultural systems or
from more remote ones. As a result, many works by these writers have been lost. In other words,
there are many women authors who have not been translated in spite of having written
important works that, according to feminisms, would have been translated if they had been
written by a male author, as illustrated by Ríos and Palacios (2006) in their analysis of
translation of Irish literature into Galician in the early 20th century.
In this sense TS have a fundamental role to play, by asking what is to be translated, who
decides what is to be translated, and what criteria are used to make such choices, as the first step
towards putting an end to this discriminatory attitude. Translation can also be taken as a
standpoint from which to help transform the contemporary literary canon by openly choosing to
recover the works by these silenced authors, which in turn would be extremely enriching for the
field of translation. In my opinion, it is not a matter of collaborating with women for the sake of
bonds of universal solidarity or simply due to the fact they are women (which would constitute a
paternalistic attitude), but instead because their works are relevant, even though that relevance
remains hidden because it does not fit the criteria laid down by the patriarchal canon.
With regard to the recovery of the classical women writers by re-writing them in other
languages, translation can serve as an instrument to contextualise them by incorporating
comments in which the translators discuss the reasons that led to these works’ being neglected.
Indeed, “recovery and commentary” are two of the strategies suggested by Massardier-Kenney
(1997: 59-62) in her proposal, in which she also examines some of the most notable examples of
authors that have been recovered by means of annotated translations of their works. Another
example is the work of Rayor (1991), when she translates and comments on seventeen Ancient

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Greek poets; of Dendrinou-Kolias (1990) with her translation of Elisavet Moutzan-

Martinengou’s autobiography (1989); of Kadish, together with Massardier-Kenney (1994), with
their rendering of Translating Slavery from French; or numerous other women translators who
have helped to make silenced authors known with their re-writings.
At this point we must also evaluate the work of resignification that translation can offer
feminist authors who, while ‘canonical’ in their original context, were appropriated by other
discourses. One clear case may be seen in the translations of Rosalía de Castro into English by
Kathleen March, where the translator recovers the author’ feminist message, which had been
neutralised in its original context by the patriarchal nationalist hierarchies so that it could fit
more easily within the ‘common cause’ (cf. González Liaño 2002).
In the case of women authors from post-colonial, remote or minority cultures, translation is
an essential (and often the only) channel of communication that these writers have to be able to
share their subjectivities with those beyond their borders. Even so, as Spivak (1993) claims, a
great deal of discernment is needed to avoid falling into the reprehensible (no matter how
benevolent) attitude of translating everything that comes from a minority, post-colonial or
remote culture; to know how to assess the ethical risks deriving from speaking for others; and to
avoid simply furthering the western interests of translation markets rather than understanding
the real situation in which the original textualities are written and to which they belong. Apart
from Spivak’s translations of the Bengali author Mahasureta Devi, other important works in this
field are those of Tharu and Lalita (1993), with the translation of texts by Indian authors
published in two volumes.
All things considered, the fact that texts written by women are translated between different
languages and cultures will allow the experiences of very different women to be gathered
together; this will help to put an end to the patriarchal assumption that man is heterogeneous and
woman is homogeneous, while also showing that gender is not a unifying principle for all
women, but rather it shapes their identity together with other variables. Furthermore, if we refer
specifically to the translation of feminist works, TS could analyse the extent to which translation
has contributed to the expansion of feminist movements around the world by means of
renderings that established a connection between different methodologies that were previously
unknown to each other.

2.3. Critical plane

2.3.1. Criticism of translations of feminist works

Despite all the difficulties women authors face to be able to publicly voice their opinions and
then get their works translated, the more feminisms advance, the easier it becomes for some
authors to publish works that, because they are brilliant pieces of writing, will later be translated
into other languages. An analysis of those materials shows that rigorous and conscious
translations are sometimes created by resorting to different strategies that TS will be able to
evaluate so that they can be used in other contexts. Yet, on many other occasions, critical
analysis reveals the existence of translations of books by authors (especially feminist authors)
carried out by “phallotranslators, inadequate interpreters of women’s writing, given an
observable reliance on engrained phallocentric assumptions” (Henitiuk 1999: 473). Either from
invisibility or from a visibility that they use to present themselves as objective and faithful
rather than making their position with respect to the text known, these phallotranslators distort
the original by incorporating into it the dominant ideology through a patriarchal translation.
One of the most paradigmatic cases is the English version of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le
deuxième sexe, translated by the zoologist Howard Parshley, who was asked to do the
translation because the book was thought to deal with sexuality and reproduction. From critical
works about this translation (cf. Simons 2001; Moi 2004; Castro 2008), it can be seen how the
translator left out almost fifteen per cent of the original French text in the first volume and
removed around sixty pages in the second in order to omit ‘uncomfortable’ facts (long sections
about women’s achievements in history, the feats of women who challenged gender stereotypes,
taboos concerning lesbian relationships, descriptions of the hard work done by housewives, and

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10trans Olga Castro

so on). Among the very serious consequences of this behaviour, perhaps the most outstanding is
the English-speaking public’s definition of Beauvoir as an incoherent and intellectually
immature philosopher, and above all the exchange of accusations between French-speaking and
English-speaking feminists as a result of interpreting different assumptions in the same text,
which actually came to uphold disparate theses.6
Tension also resulted from the English renderings of texts by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray
and Julia Kristeva owing to the “tendency to neglect full textual explanations of concepts and
rhetorical strategies” (Simon 1996: 107), which reduced the degree of acceptance and
understanding of the stances held by the French feminists among their Anglo-American
colleagues.
These “phallotranslations” not only affect canonical texts, but also any other (literary) text
in which the author breaks away from the patriarchal aim. One case is that studied by Miguélez-
Carballeira (2005) with regard to Bruce Penman’s translation into English of Esther Tusquets’
book entitled El amor es un juego solitario. In her text in Spanish, Tusquets stresses the
textual/sexual physiology by portraying female sexual pleasure by means of textual images. Yet,
in Love is a Solitary Game there are important omissions and semantic neutralisations in
fragments in which the author mentions the female sexual organ. Thus, the original Spanish “su
sexo tibio, húmedo, pegajoso y fragrante, su sexo flor en el pantano, su sexo nido, su sexo
madriguera, en el que retroceden todos los miedos, este sexo que es para Ricardo un punto de
partida…” is rendered as “there’s something warm, moist, clinging and fragrant, like a flower
in the marsh where she wandered so long, like a nest, like the lair of an animal, something
which takes away all fear. For Ricardo it is a starting point” (where the word “sexo” appears
five times in the Spanish original, but is not translated at all in the English version). And even
the description of performing fellatio as viewed from the woman’s perspective as “mientras
agita con cuidado entre dos dedos, estrecha luego en la palma de una mano firme y cálida,
oprime entre sus pechos, resigue con los pezones erizados, se desliza en la boca” not even
mentioning the penis and granting the male a passive, absent role), in English becomes “as she
flipped his organ gently between two fingers, squeezed it with a firm, warm hand, pressed it
between her breasts, stropped it against her erected nipples, and finally slid it into her mouth”
(which introduces an explicit reference to the male sexual organ and a “finally” that suggests
that, from the male’s point of view, his goal is reached).
These examples show the need for a (self-)criticising attitude in TS in order to unmask
phallotranslators with the tools offered by feminisms. But in addition, these tools are also
essential for revealing cases in which translation plays a key role in canonising certain texts as
being feminist, although in their original context they were not considered as such.

2.3.2. Criticism of paratranslations of feminist works

There is an area of analysis that is closely linked to translation and which generally gets left out
of critical analysis: paratranslation (Garrido 2005). This concept, which is normally applied in
literary translation, is based on the elements that surround and present the text, such as titles,
prologues, notes, announcements, the cover or graphic aspects. When undertaking the
translation of a book, such components, which Genette (1987) called ‘paratexts’, also have to be
transferred to the target culture. Hence, for the time being, we could say that paratranslation is
the translation of paratexts. Paratranslation is not an area reserved exclusively for translators;
other mediators (proof readers, language reviewers, editors) who usually have more power to
decide how the work is to be presented in the target society are also involved and act in
accordance with a particular ideology, which has a strong tendency to allow itself to be
influenced by economic criteria. Of all these paratexts, the iconic level is vital, as it “provocará
repercusións na propia textualidade e, consecuentemente, modificará a lectura que do texto

6
As of 1999, the year of the book’s fiftieth anniversary, feminist scholars were demanding a second English
translation of the work from the publisher Random House. Finally, in 2006, Jonathan Cape (with the rights limited
to the scope of Britain) announced a new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.

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(Re-)Examining Horizons In Feminist Translation Studies 11trans

meta fará o destinatario final”7 (Yuste 2001: 850). Therefore, when paratranslators choose the
title or a picture for the cover they are following an ideological communicative strategy that:

determina unha recepción, unha lectura ideolóxica e mesmo apunta ao tipo de público ao
que vai dirixido. Tamén pode espectaculizar por medio desas imaxes ofrecendo tamén dese
xeito adscrición xenérica, contido e argumento do libro.8 (Garrido 2005: 36)

Thus, although paratranslation is not only performed by those who translate, it does exert a
strong influence on the acceptance of the translation, and this is why TS should also pay
attention to the transmission of ideology at the paratextual level. Again, a feminist perspective
shows how the feminist paratexts of the original, which the authors did have more power to
decide over, are altered (perhaps even twisted) in an anything but naive way. This is easily
illustrated by analysing the covers of two best-selling works by two explicitly feminist writers
of contemporary Galician narratives. First of all (Fig. 1), María Reimóndez and her O club da
calceta (2006), which in the original edition came with some knitting needles and a lilac
background (a colour with feminist connotations). In the Italian translation, however, the
knitting needles were no longer important because the picture featured the long (and carefully
waxed) legs of a woman lying on a sofa, although this had nothing to do with any passage in the
novel. The second example (Fig. 2) is the award-winning Herba Moura (2005) by Teresa Moure.
The graphic elements of the original edition (a tapestry made out of different coloured fabrics)
are replaced in the first Spanish edition by a blurred picture of a woman’s face mixed with black
nightshade (herba moura), and in the second edition there was now the picture of a very sensual,
naked (medieval) woman seen from behind. That same image, but showing the whole face, was
the one chosen for the Catalan translation entitled Herba d’enamorar (love herb, in English),
showing a direct association to the properties of the herb herba moura. On the cover of the
Italian translation one of the scenes from the plot is highlighted, with a title that sets the three
main female characters in a position of dependence upon another character, Descartes (Le tre
donne di Cartesio).

7
“will have repercussions on the actual textuality and, consequently, it will modify the way the final
reader interprets the target text”
8
“… determines a reception, an ideological interpretation, and even gives an idea of the type of target
readers it is intended for. Those images can also be used as a rather spectacular means of reflecting the
genre adscription, contents and plot of the book.”

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12trans Olga Castro

2.4. Practical plane: towards a third wave?

This examination of the interactions between feminisms and translation also includes the
practical plane, that is to say, the contribution made by feminisms to the comprehension of
translational behaviour during the process in which a text in one language is converted into
another text in another language. Unlike the critical plane, it is not just a question of analysing
solutions that have (already) been adopted in the product, but of studying the process by which
one or another is adopted.

2.4.1. Translational behaviour with respect to the textual representation9 of women and men

Given the close relationship between discursive and social practices, one of the areas that can be
studied consists in analysing the translational behaviour in this process while bearing in mind
the textual/linguistic representation of women and men in the texts.
The methodological tools to be used to carry out this analysis are provided by the
framework of TS, which is characterised by the cultural or ideological turn mentioned earlier,
together with the way the dominant ideology is interpreted from the feminist viewpoints: if we
do not subscribe to a particular ideology, then we are (unconsciously) translating in accordance
with the dominant one.
From the cultural turn we translate between cultures, but we must not forget that the
counters we use to play the game (of translation) are words, sentences, texts and discourses. It
therefore follows that, in addition to the cultural studies perspective, critical linguistics or
critical discourse analysis (CDA) are also useful instruments with which to unmask how cultural
and ideological values underlie certain discourses (cf. Fairclough 1995; Fowler et al. 1979). But
the idea is to examine how the translator first reads and then transmits her or his interpretation
of the linguistic representation of men and women in the text. To achieve this, the most
appropriate thing to do is to resort to feminist critical linguistics, which combines critical
linguistics with feminism. For this reason, its evolution is directly related with these two
disciplines. And if, for years, it was conceived as second wave feminist linguistics (the one the
Canadian translators had available to them and applied), now it is more productive for TS to
evaluate the renewed possibilities of analysis offered by the “third wave feminist linguistics”
proposed by Mills (2003 and 2008).
This third wave feminist linguistics means taking discourse as the unit of analysis, which
brings it close to Lazar’s (2005) “feminist critical discourse analysis”. Thus, it abandons
sweeping statements about the systematic uses of language and focuses on the specific detailed
analysis of each statement (since there are different reading stances in each context); it avoids
isolated analyses that may give rise to universal generalisations about men and women in order
to always conduct contextualised analyses that make it possible to gain a correct understanding
of how the limits of signification are established; and it refuses to consider man and woman as
exclusive categories, but conceives them together with other variables (age, race, class, etc.) that
they always interact with.
Applying this to translation creates a new methodological framework that we could call
‘third wave feminist translation’, whose first field of analysis would consist in addressing the
discursive representation of women and men in the original text. This would always be carried
out in a detailed, contextualised manner bearing in mind the interaction between gender and
other variables. This discursive representation can become visible at different levels, such as the
word (through specific terms or, in some languages, the linguistic gender) or the phrase (idioms,
sayings, etc. in which there are no gender marks but implicitly they refer to men or women). It
must also be borne in mind that they stop being isolated elements and become components of a
discourse: that is to say, we have to take into account that the same word or phrase can be used
in two discourses in such a way that it represents its referent differently, and thus it will never
be possible to read them in an absolute manner.

9
Although I will defend a shift from the text to the discourse as the unit of analysis, I employ the notion of textual in
contrast to paratextual.

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(Re-)Examining Horizons In Feminist Translation Studies 13trans

Once this discursive representation has been addressed, we come to the second field of
analysis: considering what translational problems that representation raises, bearing in mind the
(linguistic and cultural) (im)possibilities of representing these same referents in the target
language. In other words, we are talking about examining the translational problems taken in
their discursive dimension, although they may appear in words or phrases. For example, there
are the translational problems produced by words that, depending on the discourse, can have
women and/or men as their referents (‘children’ as ‘hijas’ [fem.], ‘hijos’ [masc.], ‘infancia’
[neutr.]); problems when we are faced with a masculine form and we do not know whether its
meaning is generic or specific, this being important for the translation (‘tíos’ as ‘uncles’, ‘uncles
and aunts’, ‘aunt and uncles’, etc.); problems when a text that does not make the sex of the
referent explicit has to do so in the target text (‘you’re tired’ as ‘estás cansado’ [masc.] or
‘cansada’ [fem.]); problems when a text explicitly mentions the sex of the referent but the target
text does not need to make it explicit, although it can do (‘escritora’ [fem.] as ‘writer’ [neutr.]
or ‘woman writer’ [fem.]); or, in general, ethical problems that may arise when translating a
discourse that feminisms describe as reprehensible. But, furthermore, the third wave invites TS
to consider what problems are not raised (although they exist) due to having performed an
unconscious interpretation of the discursive representation and which will result in a re-writing
in line with the dominant ideology. We are not just talking about the “Male-As-Norm Principle”
(Braun 1997: 3) by which, if the sex of the referent is not known, the masculine will be chosen
for the translation unless there are stereotypes to the contrary. What we are talking about is that
sometimes the translator falls victim to what could be considered to be translational errors, even
when viewed from a hegemonic position. These are errors like those illustrated in these
examples, taken from an exercise with students from the Universidade de Vigo, 10 in which 16
out of 30 students translated “one experiences one’s pregnancy differently, every time” as “un
[masc.] vive o seu embarazo de xeito…” and 23 out of 30 re-wrote “he’s a very famous
gynaecologist. His patients are very happy with him” as “é un xinecólogo moi famoso. Os seus
pacientes [masc.] están moi contentos…”, thus giving rise to inconceivable situations involving
pregnant men and men who make appointments to visit gynaecologists. Here we should make a
brief aside to highlight the need for a little (self-)criticism in the pedagogical theories of
translation that would lead us, as claimed by Susam-Sarajeva (2006), to explore the role of
education in generating critical and conscious attitudes about what translating involves.
The possible impossibility of translation, to use Godayol’s words (2000: 123), requires
searching for tactical temporalities with which to temporarily resolve those problems. This third
and most thought-provoking phase is where feminisms suggest to TS the need for a (self-
criticising) attitude in order to develop new debates on a practical level that consider the
translation of gender within the framework of third wave feminist translation. One of these
debates is that proposed by non-sexist translation (cf. Castro 2006), which evaluates how
translation is affected by non-sexist language policies. Thus, based on a conscious and non-
dominant interpretation of the discursive representation of women and men, non-sexist
translation puts forward rewriting strategies that take into account the context of the translation
(function of the text, audience, type of linguistic representation, language pairs, limitations of
each text type such as poetry, sworn translation, dubbing, etc.). However, they must also value
the intertexts of the target language (the increasing use of non-sexist language in the target text
when writing the original texts). With regard to contexts and intertexts, non-sexist translation
strategies are determined by the discursive contingency, which is why they require constant
reflection and their validity is only temporary.
In any case, the third wave of feminist translation also adds two new dimensions to the
reading and ideological transmission of the discursive representation of women and men. First
of all, given its interest in the context, it encourages the examination of not only literary texts
(as has been the case almost exclusively up till now both from the Canadian school and from
later approaches) but also all kinds of text types. In this respect, the analyses by De Marco
(2006) for audiovisual translation and by Sánchez (2007) on translating scientific discourse are

10
An empirical study conducted with students from the subject ‘English/Galician translation and culture’ (BA in
Translation, Universidade de Vigo) in 2005/06.

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14trans Olga Castro

interesting works. But, in addition to literary, scientific and audiovisual translation, today we are
also living in the age of global communications, which means that other types of translation are
becoming more and more frequent in our lives. This poses a new question, as the author of
many of these documents is unknown and others are not even presented as translations. So, we
also need to analyse how these two conditioning factors affect (or not) the reading and
discursive rewriting of gender.
And secondly, given its interest in discourse (and in the word as a constituent part of a
discourse that only takes on significance in its entirety), we should also examine how ideology
affects (or not) the reading and rewriting of the discursive elements that have women and men
as referents. Up till now we have theorised on and practised translation on the basis of texts
either with either an explicit, conscious feminist ideology (the Canadian school, Díaz-Diocaretz,
etc.) or an explicitly misogynistic ideology (Levine). It is about time we asked ourselves how to
address the discursive representation of women and men when the texts do not openly manifest
a particular ideology. This raises some new questions: What readings can the third wave of
feminist translation perform to unmask the ideology when it is not obvious? If it is not explicit,
does that mean it is unconscious (and therefore dominant)? What should the ethics of translation
be based on?

2.4.2. Paratranslational behaviour with respect to the textual and paratextual representation of
women and men

Translators are generally considered to be the main operators in the translation process, but their
capacity to choose is often subordinated to the functional decisions taken by other mediatory
agents, that is, paratranslators (people responsible for proof reading, language reviewers, editing,
intermediation with clients, patrons, translation agencies, and so on), who usually have more
power to intervene in the process. These paratranslators are responsible for revising the
translation (and normally, but not always, making it fit their conscious or unconscious ideology),
although in the end it is the translator who must publicly take responsibility for the choices
made during the course of the (para)translation process. Thus, an analysis within the framework
of the third wave of feminist translation will remain incomplete unless it also asks about the role
played by paratranslators in two aspects. The first aspect concerns recommending or demanding
a particular reading and translational rewriting of the discursive elements that represent women
and men. And the second refers to their own interpretation and possible review of those
elements as they appear in the translational rewriting, when the ideologies of the two
professionals do not coincide. Both points are illustrated, in the German and Austrian context, in
an interesting study by Wolf (2006).
In addition to these power relations between the person who translates and the person who
paratranslates textual (or discursive) elements, in literary translation there are also a series of
paratextual spaces that must be translated and/or created to accompany the text. Without a doubt
TS would benefit from opening up this new field of analysis to examine the process by which
paratranslators make different decisions when it comes to transferring paratextual (or
paradiscursive) elements that verbally or iconically represent women and men.

3. Conclusions

Throughout this paper I have presented different areas of analysis that can be used to strengthen
the debate between TS and feminisms from a (self-)criticising perspective. Only this perspective
will allow us to evaluate the past interrelations and construct new productive horizons on top of
them. This can be achieved, on the one hand, by going beyond the (dominant) proposal of the
Canadian feminist translation school and drawing on new practical approaches to the process of
translation and paratranslation that lie within the framework of the third wave of feminist
translation. On the other hand, it is also necessary to enhance the interrelations on the
conceptual, critical or historiographical plane, to cite but a few. There are in fact so many that,
due to space restrictions, I have had to leave out other equally important fields of analysis, such
as the differences between women and men (as far as translation is concerned) from a

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(Re-)Examining Horizons In Feminist Translation Studies 15trans

neurobiological and neurolinguistic point of view (a very young and recent discipline that has
yet to offer conclusive findings); the influence of a masculine or feminine subjectivity in
translation (whether sex is or is not a factor that has an influence on the reading and rewriting
performed by the translator); the influence of sex on the type of translation (the types of
textualities that are most often translated by women and by men, if there are in fact any
significant differences); or the working conditions under which the profession is practised from
a gender perspective (percentage of female and male translators who are employed or self-
employed workers in literary and non-literary translation, the percentage of female and male
translators with a degree or postgraduate qualifications in translation, occupational diseases that
affect women or men translators, and so forth). As can be seen, many lines of thought can be
developed on the subject of translation studies and their interaction with feminisms, which will
undoubtedly continue to kindle interesting debates in the coming years.

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